Educating Today's Child for Tomorrow!

Proud to be part of Bushey Primary Education Federation Headteacher: Mrs M Cooper

Week 9 - 19.06.17

What a week this has been! It's a good thing we started off the week with a sun safety session delivered by Mrs Morgan. She gave a very important message which inspired many of the children to bring in later in the week some sun safety posters that they had designed at home.

This week was Sports Week with a little bit of a twist. It was Science in Sports Week and we kicked off the week with a special assembly to discuss the links between Sports and Science. B2 have been working scientifically all week and have show fantastic skills of prediction, testing and interpreting results.

Our first investigation began when we received a letter from Mrs Cooper asking us to advise her on which shoe would be best for her to wear for Sports Day. We had initial thoughts about shoes with laces, tightness of the shoe, grip, comfortable shoes, sizing of the shoe and how we would run in them on different surfaces. Our first test was to run a race with our plimsolls and school shoes. We timed ourselves with both pairs of shoes. Some of us had predicted the result accurately whilst others were surprised by their result. This helped us have some fantastic discussions when interpreting our results. In order to give Mrs Cooper even more evidence, we set up another investigation to test shoes down a ramp, observing how quickly they would go down. We thought about how the best shoe needed to have grip but shouldn't get stuck on the ramp. Our conclusions were that flat shoes were best provided they had grip and that high heels would get stuck in the grass or mud. Hopefully our advice was useful to Mrs Cooper. We did see her wearing trainers on Sports Day!!

Our second investigation was designed by B2. We looked at a picture of different children and discussed which one we thought would win a race. We considered length of legs, height, age and health of the children when deciding which one would win. We then thought of different questions we could investigate: does our food affect our performance? Do taller people win at dodgeball? Do older children do better at football? Do people with longer legs always win a race? We voted democratically and decided to investigate the question of whether taller people or shorter people would win at dodgeball. We measured all the children in the class then with Miss Hurt, the children decided to test this choosing the tallest 6 children and shortest 6 children in the class to see who would win. It turned out that despite the shortest people sometimes finding it easier to dodge the ball, the taller children were actually the best at dodgeball, possibly because they had more strength to throw the ball. As a short person myself, I would question the reliability of the test and perhaps encourage another test to prove that this conclusion is indeed accurate!

Our third investigation was a whole-school investigation to find out which of our eye was the dominant eye. We carried out a test, attempting three activities with both eyes open, right eye open and left eye open. Curling, bean bag throwing and javelin were the chosen activities since they all involved aiming. We recorded our results and were able to conclude which of our eyes helped us to aim better, therefore determining which of our eyes was dominant.

On Wednesday, B2 braved the heat to participate in Sports Day. There was some great team spirit and all pupils were supportive of each other, even while representing their different houses for the day. We really enjoyed our picnic with families so thank you to everyone who was able to be there!

On Friday, Year 6 came to visit us. Each Year 6 pupil (professional trainer) was buddied up with a Year 2 pupil (athlete) to carry out four different sports activities with them. They measured the children's heart rates before and after each activity and made observations on the physical condition of our Year 2 athletes. They also recorded their water intake, what they ate at snack time and what they had had for breakfast. It was a fantastic opportunity to observe how heart rates go up with exercise and Year 6 were really caring trainers who remained concerned about the well-being of their athletes as if million-dollar contracts were at stake!